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Jack Welch on Candor and Liz Strauss on High-Trust Culture

October 12, 2010 by Liz Leave a Comment

Lack of Candor Is a Killer

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Right at the top of the interview with Jack Welch (former Chairman and Chief Executive of GE) at the World Business forum, he spoke about leadership in many ways. The most interesting to me was his conversation about his famous policy of “Rank and Yank.”

When Jack first took over GE in 1981, America was facing high unemployment and high inflation. GE had 178 people in strategic positions and 3 business showing losses for 20 years. Welch became known as “Neutron Jack” because of the tens of thousands of positions he cut. But that single campaign left the company and the remaining employees with a streamlined organization prepared for future growth.

Hard choices and candor were his management tools. Welch is passionate and straightforward about candor in business. “I would call lack of candor the biggest little dirty secret in business, ” Welch says in his book, Winning. It “basically blockes smart ideas, fast action, and good people contributing all the stuff they’ve got. It’s a killer.” Jack’s deifnition of the difference between candor and abrasiveness is the corporate level from which the words are said. From higher up it’s candor, from lower levels it’s called abrasiveness.

I agree with Jack, nothing can break down trust (and build fear) more than lack of candor — inconsistent truth. People get fired when no one has said a word to them about their performance being less than it might be to be “great.” Then they wonder why no one told them the truth.

At GE, Jack held his managers to a policy of Rank and Yank — that every manager had to rank his or her employees and fire the bottom 10% once a year. When speaking on that at the WBF, Jack Welch seemed to have moved from firing those who might improve to retraining them. In this one minute interview, Jack explains who to keep and retrain and who to let go.

Here’s another one-minute interview with Jack on integrity, learning, and mentorship.

At the World Business Forum, Jack was clear and cogent on what makes a winning team. “You get the right players in the right positions and you will win.” Jack spoke of mentors and leaders and managing from the top, at one point delivering my favorite quote of the two-event.

“Fear as a management tool is dead.”

Jack and I are so aligned in that single statement.

How to Build a High Trust Culture

Fear cannot exist in the same space as trust. Here are a few of my best practices on how to wipe fear out of your organization. Ironically, in this grassroots social business world, developing a high trust culture a process that builds its roots from the to.

  • Leaders build a values system that resonates with everyone who helps the business thrive. This happens when leaders let go titles to be human, get their hands dirty, and invest their hearts as well as their heads outside of themselves — the higher cause of the business.
  • Incorporated core human values into your value proposition. Repeat both the same sentence every time you speak — to every audience.
  • Talk, walk, and live the truth online and offline, inside and outside the company. Trust is the hard truth spoken gently. Leaders are charged with defining the reality under which we serve the cause. Make it easy to see, hear, and understand what is valued and what is not.
  • Invite ideas and diverse thinking. Explore those ideas and thoughts that are different from our own.
  • Celebrate and reward people who live the values as well as the performance goals of the company.
  • Invite people outside the business who exemplify the same values and performance ideals to participate, engage in, learn from, and add to the culture and community you’re building.

Watching Jack it’s easy to see that the world is his natural habitat. He lives his values and feels no need to apologize for what he believes. He knows his losses, learns from them, and makes them part of his repertoire of strengths. It’s a irresistible combination of humanity and leadership.

And that sort of candor is easy to trust.

How will you contribute to building a culture of candor and trust in any business or any size?

You’ll find Jack as @Jack_Welch on Twitter — He does his own tweeting.
Read more about the World Business Forum 2010 at WBFNY.com and WBFNY-bloggershub

Be irresistible.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

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Filed Under: Community, Successful Blog, Trends Tagged With: #wbf10, bc, Jack Welch, LinkedIn, Organizational-behavior, training, trust

Five Ways to Manage the Present and Create the Future at the Same Time

October 11, 2010 by Liz 7 Comments

Do You Over Focus on the Present?

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I had the privilege of listening in and live tweeting for two days as world-class thinkers spoke to an international audience about business and the state of the world at Radio City Music Hall in New York City. It’s been my experience that when leaderships gathers to share current thoughts, though they might prepare and speak individually, if you listen carefully to their words and the big ideas an overriding theme evolves.

One overriding theme this year at the World Business Forum was the character of leadership is the foundation of great business, innovation. Vijay Govindarajan — a leading expert on strategy and innovation — spoke to three strategies for creating the future.

  1. Manage the Present
  2. Selectively Abandon the Past
  3. Create the Future

Vijay says stratefy has nothing to do with competing for the present, but everything to do competing for the future. However, we cannot compete for the future if we are not taking care of the present. The thinking process it takes to excel at managing the present is fundamentally different from that of managing the past and future to grow.

This three minute video gives a great summary of Vijay Govindarajan’s points.

Vijay speaks to the enterprise, but any small business owner, entrepreneur, consultant or freelancer knows that living in the present and building the future is the only way to survive.

Here are five of my ideas for managing the present while creating the future.

  1. Reserve time to claim what you’ve learned. Take a hour a day, a day a week, or 3 days a month to do the work of keeping your business in line.
  2. Study your losses to find the lessons. Keep the lesson and leave the losses behind.
  3. Assume that every new idea holds an opportunity in the form of a problem.
  4. Keep the realistic present in focus and keep asking people What a future version of this might look like? <-- Note: that's a different question than What is the next ____?
  5. Surround yourself with people who will tell you when your ideas are brilliant and when they are brilliantly stupid.

In an ever-changing venue with an increasing influx of information, the winning objective is not to know what we know, but be able to respond and react to changes with solid experience and a learner’s mind.

How do you manage the present and create your future at the same time?

Read more about the World Business Forum 2010 at WBFNY.com and WBFNY-bloggershub

Be irresistible.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

Buy the Insider’s Guide to Online Conversation.

Successful-Blog is a proud affiliate of

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Filed Under: Marketing /Sales / Social Media, Motivation, Successful Blog Tagged With: #wbf10, bc, Leasership, LinkedIn, Strategy/Analysis, Vijay Govindarajan, World Business Forum

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